Archive for the ‘Marketing Book Reviews’ Category

Google’s PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings

Authors Amy N. Langville & Carl D. Meyer did a fabulous job with this book. Their writing allows you to actually visualize something that is extremely mathematical and complex, not an easy thing to do. It also incorporates illustrations that go along with the text and algorithms to make it easy to understand. This book gets into the nitty gritty of page rank from crawling and indexing methods to the algorithms used to figure out page rank. Now I will admit that the the algorithms were a bit confusing for myself but if you just read through the mathematics of it this book it is still very informative. The book caters to two very different audiences from one angle it covers the curious science reader and the technical side of page rank. For those of you mathematicians it covers your intellectual interests allowing you to explore mathematically how exactly everything fits together.

Amy N. Langville is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. Carl D. Meyer is the Professor of Mathematics at North Carolina State University. He is the author of Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra. Langville and Meyer have other documents about page rank and search engines such as, Deeper Inside PageRank, The Use of Linear Algebra by Web Search Engines, Updating PageRank with Iterative Aggregation, etc.

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I haven’t much enjoyed my subscription to e-consultancy thus far. Most of the documents I’ve reviewed were not quite what I was expecting or useless (at least to me). The Online Retail 2006 guide is a clear exception. (To be fair, I’ve only read a small handful of the documents available, and I do plan on reading more.) Unfortunately I can’t find a link to this document on their website, which means my glowing review will lead to disappointment for anyone trying to find it. They do also offer a 2007 Checkout Special but I haven’t looked at it to see if it’s an updated version of the 2006.

This 85 page download first takes you through the mind of the customer, how they make their purchase decisions and then provides example after example of both good and bad implementation of shopper usability issues. More than any other book or PDF I’ve read this year, I found myself taking a considerable amount of notes, both for me, our team and for updates on our SEM processes.

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A few weeks back Michelle found a fun little document by Bill Gammel that outlines 7 marketing lessons from the show Seinfeld. I can probably count the number of full Seinfeld episodes I’ve seen on one hand. (That’s all about to change as I was just gifted with the entire series on DVD). But that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the importance that this show has had on our pop-culture.

In fact Seinfeld was probably the most important pop-culture show of all time, if one can attach the word importance to pop-culture. Not only did the show make fun of current pop culture idiosyncrasies, but it brought out into the open many of the hidden things that many of us didn’t realize that others did or thought right along with us. While Seinfeld made us laugh at these pop culture references it also created many more pop culture references that we still use today.

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Authors: Malcolm Gladwell
Hardcover: 320 pages
Cost: $10.87
Published: January, 2005

Blink is a book about the human brain. While it helps the reader better understand how the human brain works, don’t expect to be able to use that understanding to your advantage. In fact, while the book provides a fascinating discovery of how the human brain “thin slices” both people and events, the main takeaway from this is that thin slicing is either accurate or it’s not.

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Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules
Authors: Mike Moran
Hardcover: 408 pages
Cost: $16.49
Published: October, 2007

I absolutely love Mike Moran’s take on Internet marketing. Do It Wrong Quickly is not about how to do Internet marketing wrong, it’s about how to not get caught up in having to do it right so that you’ll do something now. Doing something wrong is far better than doing nothing right. Doing something wrong quickly is far better than doing something right slowly. The bottom line is that you simply need to do something.

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• 12 Basic Link Building Tactics For Beginners : The Ultimate SpiderBait
• How To Buy A #1 Organic Search Ranking On Google

• Grip Your Readers With These 7 Knock-out Opening Sentences
• Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign

Daniel Scocco’s post Six Common Punctuation Errors that Bedevil Bloggers got a bunch of comments (144 to be precise, at least at the time I am writing this). It seems that I’m not the only person who enjoyed the piece. Although discussed under Apostrophe for Plurals, what Daniel didn’t discussed in depth enough for me, was one of my biggest peeves.

Your crazy cat!
The biggest pet peeve I have, the one that really kills me when reading posts and comments, is the misuse of your vs you’re. When I come across someone using your in place of you’re, I get so irritated that I completely lose interest in the point of the post or comment. I completely disregard any relevance the writer may have. I feel that if they can’t use the right word, then they must not know what they’re talking about.

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Audio feed[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/great-seo-lie.mp3]

I’m not a Google hater. In fact I have no real problems with Google other than the standard fare. I don’t always agree with what they do and they, at times, appear to be quite hypocritical. Many would simply chalk that up to big-business. But Google’s no Enron, at least not yet. My only real problem is that Google tends to talk out of both sides of its proverbial mouth, and expects the SEO community to take them at face value. But we really can’t anymore.

I had an alternate title for this post: “Ask not what Google can do for you, but what you can do for Google”. We’re moving into a new age where we have to pay closer attention what Google does — despite what Google says.

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I think I would have titled SEOmoz’s Social Media Optimization Strategies differently. It’s more of a detailed look at the social media landscape and analysis of the major social media players. As it turns out, it’s a fantastic document that provides insights that you usually don’t get in the typical “strategies” type information.

Rand’s team does an excellent job of providing rundown of MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Squidoo, Reddit, Yahoo! Answers, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and LinkedIn. They show you how to create an account on each and the right and wrong ways to get involved in the community. They share strategies that work and don’t work on each, pitfalls to be aware of, and how best to build an active profile that is likely to get attention.

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